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67 Chapter 6 Gary and David I consider myself to have a finely tuned autism radar: if there’s an autistic kid in the room, I can pick him out in half a second . But after meeting Gary and David (twenty-five), I found myself wondering if, in fact, I would have pegged them as being on the spectrum had I not already known. Although exceedingly soft-spoken and reluctant to converse, the twins have none of the distinguishing features I’ve seen in so many autistics: no bizarre hand movements, no obvious fixations. They just come across as extremely shy. It’s easy to understand why their parents, Vicky and Bill, always assumed the twins would graduate from college and pursue careers. Perhaps Gary, the more compassionate one, would follow his interests in science and medicine to a job in physical therapy; maybe David would work with computers or accounting. They are still hoping. Though the twins are doing great, from my perspective as a parent of a more severely afflicted child—Gary has his driver’s permit, while David has already earned his license—they never did graduate from college. Their educational and professional plans were derailed almost ten years ago by debilitating episodes of catatonia and depression that Vicky believes threatened to land Gary—and perhaps David as well, although he was less profoundly impaired—in a psychiatric hospital, perhaps permanently. Gary and David are fifteen years older than Jonah and his peers, so when I met the family I couldn’t resist the impulse to ask Vicky about what life was like “back then.” As a matter of fact, she smiled, she did have an ultrasound and found out she was pregnant with twins the same way I did: two fluttering heartbeats on a computer screen. She and Bill were overjoyed at the additions to their family, which already included two-year-old daughter Stephanie. And even though Gary and David were diagnosed in 1987, well before the dramatic increase in autism coverage and services that marked the Each Day I Like It Better 68 start of the twenty-first century, Vicky’s early observations of their development also sounded very familiar. “When they were two, they weren’t that interested in other kids,” she told me, as we sat at her kitchen table eating bagels. “If I wanted them to play, I would have to sit on the floor with them and facilitate.” By the time Gary and David were three, their sometimes bizarre utterances had also begun to concern Vicky. “Not everything they said made sense,” she said. “If you asked, ‘Do you need to go to the bathroom?’ they might say, ‘I want to go to McDonald’s and ride on the horse.’” They also exhibited some hand clapping and strange sounds, including grunting. Still, the idea the boys might be on the spectrum never occurred to Vicky or Bill: “How could they be autistic ?” Vicky remembered thinking. “They hug, they’re affectionate.” It was the exact same logic Andy and I used to repeat to one another before Jonah’s diagnosis, the mantra echoed by so many parents of autistic children I’ve met since then. For a public that has been, until very recently, educated in autism solely by the movie Rain Man, the tactile-defensiveness of Dustin Hoffman’s character has come to define the disorder. Actually, although they virtually always have at least some difficulty socializing with peers, many autistic children are extremely loving and engaged with their parents and other important adults in their lives. Vicky’s path followed the same landmarks we would visit fifteen years later: an evaluation from a county therapist; confirmation from a developmental pediatrician; enrollment at an intervention preschool. And although the twins’ diagnosis preceded by more than a decade the explosion in alternative therapies that recently culminated in Jenny McCarthy’s controversial and very public proclamation that she had cured her son’s autism with vitamins and a special diet, Vicky, as I did, researched extensively, pursuing every promising lead in her quest to heal her boys. Twice—once when Gary and David were in preschool and then again when they were in kindergarten— she flew to California to consult with Dr. Sydney Walker, the director of the Southern California Neuropsychiatric Institute and author of A Dose of Sanity: Mind, Medicine and Misdiagnosis and Hyperactivity Hoax: How to Stop Drugging Your Child and Find Real Medical Help. Dr. Walker appealed to Vicky...

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